Re: Word Processors

[John R Sheets <dusk smsi-roman com>]

Olof Oberg wrote:
> 
> I was once actually paid to type down templates for 100 or so
> documents and to code automatation in Word Basic was cumbersome
> to say the least. I think with a good tutorial on doing it the
> users will benefit immensely from having a real programming
> language. 

Yeah.  I think one of the failings of MS Word is the quantum leap
between beginner and expert usage.  Word is nice and simple and clean
for basic tasks.  Writing and formatting is very easy.  But once you
break out of that beginner's box, it becomes a bewildering maze of
poorly organized, poorly documented options.  WordBasic is needlessly
cryptic (in no small part due to its bad docs).  The finer points of
custom styles and templates are buried in a horrendous interface.  A
good WP should have a much smoother slope, where the complexity of the
action is directly proportional to the knowledge needed to implement
it.  In a perfect world, anyway....

I think it would be very nice to have some sort of Guile macro generator
for the user.  I particularly like the feature of Word, where you can
create a macro through the UI, and then view the code it generates. 
This can also be used as sort of an interactive tutorial (that's what I
used it for, anyway).  E.g., "So _that's_ the syntax for inserting
today's date."

> With good I mean something easier than the Elisp
> tutorials *looking at a non-working CSS mode*.

What do you mean?  Were the tutorials released prematurely, referencing
an unfinished feature?

> The style part I am divided on. I don't like to mix things
> with different meaning and same syntax (i.e. XML and XSL) so
> I am leaning towards DSSSL. I do see the benefit of needing
> just one parser (gnome-xml), but since we already have Guile
>  present...

I'm gonna have to start weeding through all these, learning them
better....XML, XSL, DSSSL, Guile, ad nausem....  The extra knowledge
definitely won't go to waste.  (c:

> What I don't see any benefits of is to put the physical markup
> of information as the first thing the users see. It will
> inevitably result in people thinking "14pt bold Arial" instead
> of "Header of a sub section". 

Yes, this is an important abstraction.  The less technical jargon (e.g.
point sizes, font names, etc.) the user has to worry about, the easier
the UI will be to use.

>'Creativity' that means waste of
> money crippling of assumed benefits of computers in a corporate
> environment (hard to index and search such documents for example).

I'm not sure what you mean here.

John